Make your own card game with Dextrous: the online card game maker

The benefits of an online card maker

You might be asking yourself, do I really need card game design software?

The answer depends on you as a designer: your goals, your game, and your time budget.

TLDR; I've found that even if I'm designing a simple game, having a digital tool that lets me both create and adjust cards quickly during the prototyping phase is invaluable. It's this mix of speed and flexibility that makes a digital card game maker really useful.

Back before we made Dextrous, my mate Doug and I used to prototype game ideas on paper, and in Word and InDesign.

Paper prototyping is fine, but it's ugly, arguably slower than working with a digital prototype, and really hard to make changes across a deck of cards ("Gil, can you give an extra hp to all 70 Goblin cards, and enlarge all the defence icons on the City cards?"). Not my idea of fun.

Word on the other hand, is also totally fine up to a point. That point, in my opinion, is about 9 cards. As soon as you go beyond that, you start running into problems. The main problem of course is the lack of flexibility. Word is made for, well... words, not cards, and you start to see this pretty quickly. It's painful to update icons across a bunch of cards, and the grouping of shapes can often lead to things moving out of place unexpectedly or getting your screen flown to the bottom of the document. Anyone? Anyone?

We thought we'd struck gold when we discovered Excel / inDesign data merge because it seemed to be the holy grail of a graphics powerhouse and flexibility. Soon, however, I discovered it wasn't quite so simple. Aside from being quite expensive, I found there was no easy way to make text size responsive in an inDesign data merge, the printing was as inflexible as Word (I couldn't just print just the Goblins in a 3x3 grid easily), and on top of that, the data merge slowed everything down to an unbearable pace.

We tried the Magic Set editor, and a bunch of other alternatives, but ultimately the design tools seemed to be pretty expensive, or have a steep learning curve, and we weren't ready to learn yet another tool without being confident that it would be easy to customize down the track. Was there no card creator that could make flexible layouts for custom cards without huge investments in time or money?

Out of this frustration, Dextrous was born.

Doug and I set out to create a card maker that was super quick, easy-to-use and actually had competitive prices that a game designer could afford.

Use custom game card templates for faster prototyping

The key thing we wanted was a tool that allows a faster project workflow prioritising speed and customization. We wanted to be able to quickly create our own custom card layout template, and then apply it to every card in a deck. The goal was to be able to edit this layout in one place (when we inevitably made changes after playing the game) and have these changes automatically get applied to each game card in the deck.

So now in Dextrous, the workflow looks like this:

1. Choose your card size:

You can choose from different sizes and we've got all the favourites, including poker, bridge, business, tarot and jumbo (double poker) as well as other sizes. We also offer ready-made component shapes like hex tiles or circle tokens so you can start creating different game pieces for your card or board game.

2. Customize your card type layout (card fronts and backs)

This is where the creativity and the fun begins. You can grab an inbuilt card template, or make your own from scratch with our drag-and-drop layout maker. Create your card layout with text and artwork and watch your changes update in the preview in real-time. You can easily create custom art by dragging and dropping your own images too.

The great thing is, you can customize your layout at every stage of the design journey. So if you decide to change the border color or add a new design element (an image etc.) after your first playtest, you can just go back to the layout and have the color changed on every card instance in your deck. Another nice layout feature here is text-shrink: if a card has more text than another, it will automatically shrink to fit in the zone you have set in the layout.

3. Make the cards for your game

Once you have the layout for your card set, you can create a deck easily. Using a simple table, you can make any number of cards by filling each one with its unique text or imagery. You can also link to a Google sheet csv file here, and this is where functionality meets flexibility. If you want to change multiple cards (for example, give all the Goblins an extra hp), you don't have to click around on different individual cards, you just type your changes in the table. This allows you to create card decks at speed. Once you have finished the card creation of your custom deck, you're ready to get it to the table to play with friends.

4. Export your deck (PDF, TTS, or PNG)

Getting your card game to the table is always the priority, and there are essentially two options. You can export your cards to PDF so you can print and play right away, or hit the digital table by exporting to Tabletop Simulator or other platforms like Screentop.gg. We also allow you to export high quality PNGs of your decks of cards, which is perfect for use with platforms like Tabletopia.

Print and play PDF:

Dextrous can auto-magically layout the cards you want to print from your deck onto Letter, A4 or A3-sized paper. We've also made it easy to select only the cards you want to print, so you can do smaller print runs and save on ink while prototyping at home. Alternatively, you could load the pdf print-and-play file to a print-on-demand platform like Drive-through cards (though I must admit I've not tried that myself yet).

Checkout our free pdf card templates (playing cards and game cards) for examples of decks exported from Dextrous.

Export for Tabletop Simulator:

Making cards for Tabletop Simulator is really handy these days as the pandemic has changed the landscape of playtesting, and it allows us to get tabletop games in front of playtesters remotely (and for a fraction of the cost!). We wanted to cater for this approach so we gave Dextrous built-in exporting to Tabletop Simulator which is second to none. Dextrous hosts your deck images so you can just drag your special deck .json file into your TTS project folder and voila! Your card game has hit the digital table. Because we host your deck img blocks for you, there's no uploading of individual images needed, and you can also use this method to update games already in progress (ie a TableTop Simulator saved game) with the click of a button.

Export PNGs:

We let you export individual images of each card in your project. This is especially handy for platforms like Tabletopia or Screentop.gg, which are really designed to work with individual card images.

Let Dextrous be your online card design expert

So whether you want to make your own custom playing cards, or you're looking to create the next Magic: the gathering, we think Dextrous provides a powerful, user-friendly, and flexible tool to get your ideas out of your head, and onto the table.

So if you're looking to design a deck using an online maker, check us out today and let us know what you think! We'd love to help you create your own games and make custom game components to bring your game idea to life.